How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS

bugsmith@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 110 points –
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1.2 million page views per month

1,200,000 / 30 days / 24 hours / 60 minutes / 60 seconds is 0.46 requests per second.

That is crazy low and is nothing to shout about. I notice people like to this in months to inflate the number to looks bigger. But calculating it down to RPS puts it to a perspective.

So why not create a website out of really, really old technology?

PHP 8.0 is no longer supported so I hope they update the "really, really old technology" to at least PHP 8.1 today.

Either way that VPS will cost 10-20$ depending on CPU form a good provider. You can't get that cheap with a bunch of AWS services for that number of requests.

Also, if they were using an hyped tech stack (nodejs or wtv) they wouldn't be able to handle the request spikes like they do. 0.46 requests per second means nothing because I'm sure they've hours of full inactivity and others serving 10 requests / second that would totally obliterate 2GB of ram if done on nodejs and a Mysql DB.

$10-20 is what that VPS costs at a cloud provider. You could also dockerize and use a container service like GCP Cloud Run combined with cloud storage within that budget.

I'm not a big node guy, but I also kind of doubt nodejs would fail to handle 10RPS on 2gb of memory. I guess it all depends on what the requests are doing.

10-20$ ? I think it is way cheaper. I doubt they need a good CPU, some vcores will do.


edit:

Here is an 8GB 6vcore ARM VPS from a reputable German server host for 7€

https://www.netcup.de/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=3564

Here is a 2GB 2vcore x86 for 3.25€

https://www.netcup.de/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2948

Not to mention - they have regular deals, where you can get them for a permanent 50% off (during black friday and winter sales) I have been paying 17€ per year for the 2GB version.

You going for ultra cheap most likely that that reliable, I was pointing at companies like Digital Ocean.

The netcup vps I have has a 100% uptime during the past 5 years. But no heavy use ofc, just wireguard

I've been using netcup for a decade. They're very reliable and high quality. (Management/Admin interface, functionality, help wiki. Never had reliability issues.)

I've used other providers before. I'm very satisfied with netcup.

Indeed. They say they've been repeatedly featured on the front page of HN and the site didn't fall over, I've seen many examples that did.

PHP 8.0 is no longer supported so I hope they update the “really, really old technology” to at least PHP 8.1 today.

Most likely. This blog was written in February 2022; support for PHP 8.0 was only dropped in November 2023.